Mark Twain: 5 Things Men Should Know

Mark Twain: 5 Things Men Should Know

3- Mark Twain was the first to write a novel on the typewriter

Another thing you didn't know about Mark Twain is that he liked being on the cutting edge of technology.

Not only was Twain a frequent investor in a variety of upstart inventions (a habit that would contribute to his bankruptcy filing), but he was also associated with some of them. For instance, Twain boasted that he was the first person in history to have a telephone in his home for personal use, despite having declined to invest in Alexander Graham Bell's invention. And in 1905, an ad by the Remington Typewriter Company quotes from his ”unpublished autobiography,", in which Twain notes that he was "the first person to apply the Type-machine to literature." A dispute exists over just which book Twain is referring to: the ad claims it was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer while scholars think it was Life on the Mississippi.

4- Mark Twain published a president’s memoirs

In 1884, Twain undertook a business venture that at the start seemed like it would be a great success: he launched his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Company (Webster being his nephew by marriage as well as his business agent). Among the first works he published was Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs in 1885, shortly before the former president died. Despite — or perhaps due to — Grant's scandal-plagued terms in office, the publication was a tremendous success, praised then and now for its high literary qualities.

Unfortunately, Twain's publishing company went under after a decade, along with the rest of his finances, even though the company published Twain's masterwork, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

5- Mark Twain invented a replacement for suspenders

The last thing you didn't know about Mark Twain is that he was an amateur inventor.

He received the first of his three patents in 1871 for "an Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments," an adjustable strap that he hoped would spell the end for suspenders, which he personally disliked. Two years later, he was granted his second patent, this time for a self-pasting scrapbook that proved his most successful invention (selling in excess of 25,000 units). Finally, in 1885, he received a patent for what the U.S. Patent Office today describes as "a history trivia game."

Unlike much of his writing, his patents were attributed to Samuel L. Clemens, not Mark Twain.